Oracle's MBaaS - Is It Ready for Primetime?

Rich Mendis, 23 Jun 2015

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In case you missed the news, Oracle recently launched a number of new cloud services. One of which was a mobile backend as a service called Mobile Cloud. We were obviously very interested in the news here at AnyPresence, as creators of our own enterprise-grade MBaaS platform. Oracle’s announcement is great validation of the need and importance of MBaaS as a viable approach to solving enterprise needs for multi-channel mobile apps, but it’s missing several key ingredients for the enterprise, which is surprising, given it’s their target customer. I’ve outlined those ingredients below:

  1. Connectivity to databases: Will Oracle’s solution enable connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server or SAP HANA? Enterprise customers have many databases running within the organization that need to be mobile enabled. How will Oracle’s MBaaS support the non-Oracle databases? An MBaaS solution needs to be vendor-agnostic by definition. Will Oracle play nicely with others?
  2. On-premise deployment: As far as we can tell, this is a cloud-only service. Most enterprises, however, will need a combination of cloud and on-premise deployments of mobile backend infrastructure. A cloud-only deployment service will not enable connectivity to an SAP ERP system behind the firewall, for example. The ability for an enterprise to deploy the backend server components in the DMZ on-premise is a key requirement for many customers.
Oracle may position other solutions like Fusion middleware to solve some of these problems, but that negates the cost and simplicity arguments inherent in a “next-generation” solution. A related question: how will customers in a regulated environment such as finance and healthcare use a cloud-only solution? Will Oracle comply with PCI and HIPAA regulations? These customers often require on-premise or hardened deployments, which this solution doesn’t seem to address.

At AnyPresence, we’re learning more and more that enterprises are skeptical about adding new layers to their IT stacks. While a flexible cloud back end for mobile apps is compelling, we’re moving beyond the MBaaS standard fare, to more sophisticated, back¬end tooling that allows developers to explore a wider range of use cases. Which is one of the many reasons, we launched JustAPIs, to enable developers to design and produce custom APIs for mobile and IoT apps, migrate apps to a new backend server without having to change any code and stimulate live APIs for hackathon events.

Welcome to the party, Oracle. We look forward to seeing you in the market, and hope to see your considerable marketing focus on educating companies on the importance of backend services and API-first architectures for modern digital enterprises.

To learn more about enterprise MBaaS requirements, download our newest whitepaper: Top 10 Characteristics of Enterprise Backend Services (BaaS/MBaaS).